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Postscriptum: In some OO theory, I think it's believed favorable to create distinct attributes for things that are ordered (since [Boyce-] Codd believed that attributes are intrinsically unordered): this, for Mike Spreitzer's example of "list of authors": firstAuthor, secondAuthor, thirdAuthor, etc. Well, suppose there are in fact three groups of authors, with different principles of sub-ordering, which are masked in the typical presentation... it may then be more economical (80:20 rule, which I detest) to say that we allow an attribute value which is an orderable list of (sub-)tokens. I have seen -- indeed, documented -- some works which enumerated over 30 authors for the piece. Volumes/analytical works from the French academies. (And why not? Only the aesthetics of print books and the supposed cost of printer's ink have lead to style rules that say "truncate with 'etc' after N authors...".) In such cases: I suspect the order (-edness, -ability) has nothing to do with whether the factoids are (meta-)data or not. Nothing is simple, despite what could appear to be incontrovertible facts. -r -------------------------------------------------------------- On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Tim Bray wrote: > At 11:41 AM 12/2/99 PST, Mike Spreitzer wrote: > >What about the list of authors of a scholarly paper? Isn't that metadata for which order > >matters? > > Yep, in fact that's the one use-case that kept coming up during the early > stage of RDF design. Here's another one for free: content models. But > the notion that there is some ordering on a document's author, title, > and date-of-publication is surprising and unnatural. -T. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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